I pulled the 1 TB drive with the Mac OS and filled all 4 drive bays with Hitachi Deskstar 3TB drives and ran the Mac OS X install disc and applications disc. Apple's Drive Utility had NO PROBLEM formatting the drives HFS+ Journaled and create a bootable Mac. The Apple SW Raid was even able to stripe Mirror 0 the other 2 drives.

The problem I ran into was when I tried to use the 4th drive exclusively for Windows 7 64 bit Pro via Bootcamp. The install went fine, but when I looked at the drive I saw that the drive was only using 2.2 TB.

I believe the Hitachi 3TB drives come pre-formatted for 2.2TB NTFS to avoid all the HUGE issues on the WIndows platform around being able to use these drives (ie you can't use them for boot, and you need to format GPT and you need Vista 64 or Win 7 64 bit, not the 32 bit versions.

So i used Apple's Disk Utility and Paragon's NTFS for MAC to format the 3 TB drive NTFS GUID. Big mistake. I haven't been able to install Windows 7 despite spending 2 days on it.

When I used the Mac Disk Utility software to format the full 3TB drive as one partition the WIndows 7 installer says that "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style." It didn't seem to matter if I tried to run with Bootcamp's help, or solo (ie pulled the Mac drive out and treated this as a PC only rig). Windows 7 installer's format and delete options also resulted in this same error. My guess is that the WIndows disk supports EFI boot and format, but that the installer won't put Win 7 Pro 64 bit on a GPT or GUID disk, that it has to be a Master Boot Record or MBR disk with a maximum of 2.2 TB (32 bit size).

I've tried partitioning the drive into a smaller 2.2TB size to see if that would help. My guess is that the Apple formater isn't the same kind of format that Hitatchi originally had on the drive.

Running the windows 7 Pro installer just got me into an endless loop with the drive. Holding the mouse button after the beep on the restart was the only way to get the WIndows 7 install disc out of my mac. Otherwise I got the "Press any key to boot from CD or DVD".... message that goes in an endless loop.

Once I had the disc out all I got under Win 7 hard drive boot was a black screen with blinking cursor loop.

If I hold down the option key I could get the options for my 3TB Mac drive, my 3TB windows drive, the GRMCPRXFREO_EN Windows 7 Pro installer disc icon and a EFI Boot disc icon. Choosing EFI Boot just freezes on the startup disk screen. Rerunning the Windows 7 disc installer just puts you back into the press any key to boot loop.

At this point I'm giving up on using a 3 TB Hitachi, 3tb Seagate or a 3 TB Western Digital drive as a boot drive for Windows 7 and I'll put in a 2 TB disk drive that stays in the 32 bit world of Master Boot Records until Microsoft can work out a real 64 bit boot environment.

Interestingly Apple OS X 10.6.6 did include support for exFAT which does support 3 TB, but this disk format has no error correction settings, and is much more prone to read/write errors if improperly shut down. SInce there are almost no diagnostic exFAT I think folks are much better off with NTFS or FAT32 (which doesn't have much error support, but at least their are recovery and backup utilities).

A good idea is to strip a drive of all partitioning with WD Lifeguard (from within Windows).

For OS, an SSD 80GB is fine. Use mechanical drive for data etc.

GPT booting in Windows is being added for X68 boards to support UEFI and Sandy Bridge, but Apple uses a proprietary version of UEFI and don't expect to see EFI firmware updates.

Other threads have taught me that the Apple Pro RAID card's firmware doesn't support 3TB drives, and has trouble there, so I think they have a lot of work on their hands with 3TB already.

UEFI does have "some" support, very limited, with 64-bit Vista SP1 and later, but not on Macs, I think Itanium and Windows Server 2008.

I wish Apple Disk Utility and Boot Camp Assistant would be rolled into one utility, much easier, but DU isn't useful - At least Paragon NTFS seems to be better and closer to Microsoft NTFS 3.1 standard, but always best to let Windows do the formatting.

And Paragon's Hard Disk Manager 2011 Suite has a lot of features and tools rolled in, and Boot Camp support.

If your operating system is either Windows 7 or Vista, WD recommends using the latest Intel driver version 9.6 or later for maximum performance in all situations. Please visit Intel for the latest driver downloads.

Christian Riley wrote:I tried a 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT drive in the July 2010 Mac Pro (and a Jan 2008 Mac Pro) on the RAID Card that came with the machines (so one is the RAID Card now shipping) and both show a maximum of 2.2 TB with a 3TB drive.

Sounds like the RAID controller needs a firmware update. Whether one exists or not is another story

The Western Digital 3TB drives have a computability jumper - I don't think the Seagate's do It would be interesting to see if the WD with the jumper set works with the built in RAID controller. It's good to know that the 3TB drives work without the Apple hardware RAID controller.

From all the threads in these forums, the Apple hardware RAID controller really sounds like a bad deal - not very flexible at all, even if it is convenient to allow an internal hardware RAID array.

So... Just to recap: it appears the answer to Christian's question is currently "NO" <-- You can't use larger than 2.2TB drives and have them recognized for their full storage capacity at the moment with an Apple RAID Card in a Mac Pro/Xserve. The drives will work fine, but at reduced 2.2TB capacity.

No word yet if the "compatibility switch" on WD drives makes any difference, and only the 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT drives have been tested with an Apple RAID Card for certain (by Christian). The drives were formatted GPT, and work fine at full capacity in the Mac Pro without the Apple RAID Card.

Possibilities for a fix are a firmware upgrade for the Apple RAID Card to address a possible 4K/512b issue, but that's just an educated guess by all the fine minds in this thread.

Thanks to the Hatter and and Grant for trying to keep the thread on topic. I recapped only because others might be in the situation I am and need this answer quickly, if this topic got anymore general with the other scenarios addressed as well I never would have made it through the thread.

I will be purchasing 4 - 3TB Drives for a Mac Pro with Apple RAID Card shortly... If I only get the 2.2TB per drive to use it will still meet my needs, but if anyone wants to suggest a drive model to try please feel free. Currently I'm leaning toward the Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000. I just can't see any reason for SAS over SATA in this case, and I don't even see any 3TB SAS drives available, but if someone knows something I don't please fill me in!

"Green" drives are great for backups, but not appropriate for System Disks. They tend to spin down and power down, and the system tend to visit the Boot drive very frequently to get a few more blocks of one thing or another.

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